KDEEdu/Language/Personas

 

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Personas for Language Learning

We use Personas to define the scope and target audience for our applications. The following personas specifically apply to language learning applications. Since learning is a continuous process where we expect a user to become more proficient, we use the following approach

• a Persona defines the characteristics of a user group
• the proficiency level of a user is denoted by A, B, and C, which corresponds to the CEF competence levels: Common European Framework of Reference for Languages

Notes about Personas in General

Personas is an established usability practice. Personas should represent the different user types. As such they are an useful tool: They help the designers to step out of their own shoes to figure out users' goals, preferences, limitations and behavior.

A Persona description should consist of behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and also a description of environment of use. A realistic description brings the persona to life and opens different views to the designer: For example two different personas might approach the same problem from a different angle and probably they would use different ways of action to achieve the same goal. So the same use cases should be possible to do in different ways, depending on the personas skills, behaviour patterns etc.

Language Learning Personas

Tina, the Professional

Characteristics:

• very motivated to learn a new language (e.g. for job)
• also requires very specialized vocabulary

Story: Tina is a professional in the IT industry and she works for a big international company. In her job she has to work at projects with different international partners. Tina is quite interested in languages and already speaks some, though at different competence levels (English C2, French B1, Spanish B2). Now she is starting to learn Greek as soon she will be project lead for an important project with a Greek partner company.

Gan, the Hobby Learner

Characteristics:

• learning a new language is one among several hobbies (without high priority)
• goal is enjoy learning a new language, wants to be able to have simple conversations in target language
• only aims to be able to communicates in basic words when traveling

Story: Gan recently retired and is faced with a multitude of things he can do in his free time. He found a favor of traveling a lot to several countries. His next destination is India and he wants to prepare himself for this trip by learning to speak and read some basic phrases in Bengali. Though he no even knows the alphabet. If he does not see any progress in his learning he also may give up.

Camille, the Student

Characteristics:

• has to fulfill demands of teachers and pass exams
• gets homeworks form teacher
• gets vocabulary list

Story: Camille is a French girl, 14 years old and still goes to school. She is currently in the 6th grade and learns English since two years now. Besides the regular vocabulary lists to memorize and homework exercises to complete, she got a really good teacher who encourages his students to get more familiar to the language. The teacher provides vocabulary lists in a standard format while Camille's English books only have "phase6"-format files. Camille likes to train her English skills by listening to English radio, reading English texts and training her pronunciation.

Others

There are more possible target groups (e.g. learning in class) but currently out of scope.

Proficiency Levels

We define a coarse set of CEFR inspired levels. A level describes what a learner is supposed to be able to do in reading, listening, speaking and writing, yet tailored to the proficiencies we are interested with regard to our educational learning applications.

0: Starter

• Starting level without expectations.

A: Basic User

• Can read letters and words, knows the alphabet.
• Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions, very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type, frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance.
• Can understand other persons talking slowly and clearly.

B: Independent User

• Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc.
• Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialization.
• Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

C: Proficient User

• Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognize implicit meaning.
• Can express ideas fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions.
• Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes.
• Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.

see Wikipedia for detailed CERF levels